{"id":360,"date":"2016-02-27T22:20:19","date_gmt":"2016-02-27T22:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teachingblogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/hst6347\/?p=360"},"modified":"2016-08-18T21:20:16","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T21:20:16","slug":"aesthetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/philosophy\/2016\/02\/27\/aesthetics\/","title":{"rendered":"Aesthetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chloe Pritchard\u00a0took the \u2018Philosophical Britain\u2018 module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post she writes about \u2018Aesthetics\u2019 as a\u00a0philosophical keyword.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Aesthetics has been defined by the Oxford English dictionary as \u2018a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, or the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste’.<\/p>\n

Appreciation of pleasing aesthetics, or \u2018beauty\u2019, has been perceived by some academics as a means of communicating\u00a0that begins as\u00a0early as\u00a0childhood. As Barbara Herberholz hypothesises, aesthetic judgement involves an awareness of our environment, and that early childhood is the time for aesthetic beginnings and foundations. Thus, appreciation for aesthetics resonates so deeply within our society and culture that many believe it begins as early as childhood.<\/p>\n

To understand how the appreciation of pleasing aesthetics has become so permeated into our society, we must study its philosophical and historical origins. The appreciation of beauty, or of pleasant aesthetics, arose primarily from\u00a0prominent ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle. These philosophers\u00a0explored the subject of aesthetics from a combination of empirical and moral methods, which included\u00a0pleasing aesthetics as one of the \u2018highest forms\u2019 of goodness on Earth,\u00a0attempting to quantify\u00a0mathematical properties of ‘beauty’, and perfect aesthetics\u00a0in a human as a paragon for virtue.<\/p>\n

\"Sandro

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1486). Tempera on canvas, Uffizi, Florence. In Roman mythology, Venus was the Goddess of beauty, love, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire. The Goddess Venus is often seen as the classical personification of beauty.<\/p><\/div>\n

From the 1700s onwards, the study of aesthetics became a topic of philosophical interest. Prominent philosophers such as Hume and Kant both addressed the philosophical appreciation of beauty: they argued that aesthetic pleasure was something universally shared, and that pleasure is derived from a universal agreement of good taste. This universality of aesthetics has been questioned by some modern feminists, who argue that philosophers in the\u00a018th century who could afford (and who had the leisure time) to produce supposed universal truths were in a position of privilege;\u00a0the elitist philosophers ‘universal truths’ and policies of absolutism were\u00a0therefore subjugated to their own\u00a0class and gendered perceptions,\u00a0their ‘universal truths’ often unknowingly excluded\u00a0opinions from\u00a0the alternative\u00a0classes and the opposing gender.<\/p>\n

During the 1800s, ‘aestheticism’, the movement around the appreciation of aesthetics, promoted the ideal of beauty over social-political themes as the inspiration for literature, fine art, music, and other arts. The discussions around aestheticism became more varied and complex during this era: For instance, music, previously deemed beautiful but trivial in aesthetics terms by Kant in his work Critique of Judgement<\/em>, became divided into two contrasting philosophies in the\u00a019th century: formalism and anti-formalism.<\/p>\n

Formalists believed that music could only be appreciated as intelligent and beautiful manipulations of sound,\u00a0essentially as a pleasant sound aesthetic. Although formalists appreciated music, they\u00a0believed that music held no deep philosophical meaning. Those philosophically opposed to this\u00a0concept of\u00a0music, or the aesthetics of sound, as nothing more then an arrangement of pleasant noises\u00a0were referred to as anti-formalists. Famous anti-formalists included prominent composers and philosophers such\u00a0as Richard Wagner and Nietzsche. They believed that the aesthetics of sound, i.e music,\u00a0could be utilised as a form of expressing alternative artistic meanings and emotions, however\u00a0they believed\u00a0music could\u00a0only be used to enhance other\u00a0artistic mediums,\u00a0like plays or works of art, and not as its own\u00a0form of art. The clip below is\u00a0an extract from\u00a0Wagner’s famous opera ‘the ring cycle’, and shows how music was successfully used to enhance the theatricality of the story.<\/p>\n